FISH(1) fish-shell FISH(1)

NAME

fish - the friendly interactive shell

SYNOPSIS

fish [OPTIONS] [FILE [ARG ...]]
fish [OPTIONS] [-c COMMAND [ARG ...]]

DESCRIPTION

fish is a command-line shell written mainly with interactive use in
mind. This page briefly describes the options for invoking fish.
The full manual is available in HTML by using the help command from
inside fish, and in the fish-doc(1) man page. The tutorial is
available as HTML via help tutorial or in man fish-tutorial.

The following options are available:

-c or --command=COMMAND
Evaluate the specified commands instead of reading from the
commandline, passing additional positional arguments through
$argv.

-C or --init-command=COMMANDS
Evaluate specified commands after reading the configuration
but before executing command specified by -c or reading
interactive input.

-d or --debug=DEBUG_CATEGORIES
Enables debug output and specify a pattern for matching debug
categories. See Debugging below for details.

-o or --debug-output=DEBUG_FILE
Specifies a file path to receive the debug output, including
categories and fish_trace. The default is stderr.

-i or --interactive
The shell is interactive.

-l or --login
Act as if invoked as a login shell.

-N or --no-config
Do not read configuration files.

-n or --no-execute
Do not execute any commands, only perform syntax checking.

-p or --profile=PROFILE_FILE
when fish exits, output timing information on all executed
commands to the specified file. This excludes time spent
starting up and reading the configuration.

--profile-startup=PROFILE_FILE
Will write timing for fish startup to specified file.

-P or --private
Enables private mode: fish will not access old or store new
history.

--print-rusage-self
When fish exits, output stats from getrusage.

--print-debug-categories
Print all debug categories, and then exit.

-v or --version
Print version and exit.

-f or --features=FEATURES
Enables one or more comma-separated feature flags.

The fish exit status is generally the exit status of the last
foreground command.

DEBUGGING

While fish provides extensive support for debugging fish scripts, it
is also possible to debug and instrument its internals. Debugging
can be enabled by passing the --debug option. For example, the
following command turns on debugging for background IO thread events,
in addition to the default categories, i.e. debug, error, warning,
and warning-path:

> fish --debug=iothread

Available categories are listed by fish --print-debug-categories. The
--debug option accepts a comma-separated list of categories, and
supports glob syntax. The following command turns on debugging for
complete, history, history-file, and profile-history, as well as the
default categories:

> fish --debug='complete,*history*'

Debug messages output to stderr by default. Note that if fish_trace
is set, execution tracing also outputs to stderr by default. You can
output to a file using the --debug-output option:

> fish --debug='complete,*history*' --debug-output=/tmp/fish.log --init-command='set fish_trace on'

These options can also be changed via the FISH_DEBUG and
FISH_DEBUG_OUTPUT variables. The categories enabled via --debug are
added to the ones enabled by $FISH_DEBUG, so they can be disabled by
prefixing them with - (reader-*,-ast* enables reader debugging and
disables ast debugging).

The file given in --debug-output takes precedence over the file in
FISH_DEBUG_OUTPUT.

COPYRIGHT

2023, fish-shell developers

3.7 February 12, 2025 FISH(1)